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Sun Gate Serials–Continuity Drift

The main variable in a javascript file is usually a function: var main = function(){}; with whatever code you want between the braces. What you open, though, you need to close. What you start you need to finish.

You link to the script from the main html page, usually somewhere near the end of the body. Files for web pages, like people, can’t really function in isolation.

I went back to the Sungate in December, just before I left Peru.

The guy who hired me said it was hard to get lost in the mountains. I managed, plenty of times. My ultimate goal, a kind of focus for my thoughts, was the Intipuncu, the gate of the sun. Not the famous one, near Machu Picchu–a more minor gate on a distant peak. It was a full day hike from Ollantaytambo, but on a clear day you could see, if you knew where to look, the profile of the ruins. Hiking to them, you only lost sight of your goal briefly, working your way around the contour of the preceding mountain. That’s where I got lost.

In Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive, the second volume of which I just finished reading, there is a metaphysical dimension to which pattern-based magical creatures (Spren) are native. Socrates talks about something similar with Plato’s realm of forms. Everything there is reduced to an idea of itself, reality rendered as distinct spherical objects which, if you are a Surgebinder, you can manipulate. Basically the internet. You have to be careful though, especially if you aren’t sure how the source-code functions. Mess with the script where the world interfaces with human symbols for it, and the results will be different than you imagine, filled with bugs only errors and trials can eliminate.

Walking in the mountains, you not only have to be going the right direction, but at the right altitude. On a previous attempt I had stayed too low and gone too far, ending up in an overgrown and precipitous ravine, scaling through thorns, and a young boy yelled at me in Spanish, telling me I had to go back and up, pointing, but there wasn’t time.

The first attempt to get to the sun gate was with B, a guy from Vermont, just out of high school. He had a book, with an entry on the Intipuncu, as well as an open tomb with ancient skulls elongated in the back–I just looked up what that pre-occipital part would be called, and there is apparently a temporal bone on either side. Anyway, they had managed to stretch out time, and I sat with them after thousands of years.

That wasn’t really the first attempt, though. I had been weekend wandering that slope for a while, carrying fruit and water in a case meant for a mandolin. The second time, we turned back even closer, where you could see that a landslide-like slurry was actually a huge, sheared-off chunk of granite cliff. The gate was so close, waiting for us, but the other teacher we brought with us was tired, and it would be getting dark.

The third time, with three of us, we made it. The geological bowl that had bound me for eight months or so I could finally peek over the edges of, my view suddenly doubled as I reached the ridge.

There are prefabricated frames I cold use here, existing libraries to load, “persistence in the face of difficulty” or “travel narrative” or “book promotion,” but I would prefer not to use them, leaking politely out of doors and windows. This is about the fourth time I climbed up there, the time that doesn’t exist.

My speculative fantasy novel, Runeshadow, is now available for free download.